Nurses test out diagnosis over the internet

13.10.2011

Can a wound be properly assessed using a medical app on a mobile phone? And does video streaming work for this purpose? Nursing students are testing precisely this in a Living Lab project funded by NordForsk.

In the fictional scenario designed for the current experiment, a patient in his home makes a video call to seek advice about treating a wound. The video will be played for a group of nursing students, who will then respond to a series of questions about how they experienced the use of video streaming and ICT as a diagnostic tool.

In the experiment, the nursing students will watch a 30-second video recorded on a smart phone that gives little spoken information and shows the wound from several angles. The app will then be run in an emulator (KauNet) in two versions: one in which the network quality is excellent and one in which there is substantial interference. Three meetings are planned to be held with the nurses: one before the experiment, one at the time of the experiment, and one a week after the experiment to see how the students’ expectations and perceptions change over time.

“We are seeking to identify and understand the mechanisms that lead to value for a customer or user and the relationship between these mechanisms and the technological platform for the service,” explains Anna Brunström, a professor of computer science at Karlstad University. “It is therefore vital to involve users in the innovation process – particularly when developing new ICT infrastructure, services and media.”

Compare Testlab in Karlstad is providing expertise and infrastructure for testing and quality assuring the services under development. “It is all about building a lab environment where we not only test, for example, net capacity on its own, but where we incorporate users’ quality perceptions and experience of the services as well,” says Torbjörn Wiger of Compare Testlab.